A middle-aged man dreaming of the day when he can stop begging for scraps and write for a living.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Firefox...Myths?

A while ago I encountered a rather disturbing website, whyfirefoxisblocked.com which explains that Firefox is evil because it allows you to use an addon called Adblock to...well...block ads. This is apparently the greatest possible sin of any browser because it apparently allows you to steal web content without paying for it.

The funny thing is, I don't recall paying for any web content in the first place.

It's a remarkable piece of FUD that attacks Firefox because it allows third parties to create and use popular addons like Adblock because they found a need and wrote an addon to fill it. Adblock wouldn't be such a threat to these people if it weren't so popular. Nevermind that the majority of the people who use Firefox don't have the first clue about addons and don't care. Nevermind that Adblock was created precisely because there's so much junk cluttering up our screens and wasting our bandwidth that those of us who do have a clue are pleased at how easy it has become to filter it out. I could do the same thing by modifying my hosts file and redirecting all those addresses to 127.0.0.1. Adblock just makes it more convenient.

It's the notion that ad-blocking is theft that really gets my goat. It's the same premise the RIAA and the MPAA use when claiming loss of income due to piracy. The people who use Adblock like myself are people who are inclined not to click on ad links because they tend to annoy us. I stopped using the Opera browser in spite of its technical superiority precisely because it doesn't offer a widget to compare to Adblock. If it did, I would use it. Nobody on the web has lost any money because I refuse to click on ads; Adblock just makes it easier for me to surf without all those annoying popups, java adverts and other things that spam me.

This guy is trying to pull a classic scam wherein he claims scarcity where there is none. So I found his email address and wrote him the following message:

Wow. Just...wow. I haven't seen so much rationalization and false assertions since the Evangelicals opened the Creationism Museum. Now let's see who you REALLY are...